Poll: would you pay more than 50L for an ad with new search?

Sorry Kitty, I misunderstood!

At any rate, I get the feeling that LL is trying to move toward having one major search, hence the All tab. That's why I would suggest the three major tabs of All, People, and Land.

Exactly what he described is what happened to me. I doubled the size of my lot and when I combined the two my include in search box became unchecked. I didn't catch it until the next day but that's been two weeks now. Hope they fix it soon.

It still amazes me this wasn't all worked out on the beta grid first.

That is not a bug. That is a protective feature when you make parcel changes - it prevents new parcel owners from accidentally having to pay $L30 per week without realizing it (from a previous owner's settings). Same thing happens with rights to create objects, enter objects and run scripts - when they are set to group they revert to "all residents" - so you might want to check that as well.

Makes sense. I understand that unchecking the L$30/week is not a bug, but to then have to wait weeks just to get my property listed back again seems a bit much.

Bradley - sorry - having read the blog - there is a bug (reported by James Linden) with the checkbox. If you leave it unchecked for any length of time, then check it again, it can then take FOUR weeks for the new search to relist your parcel.....

I haven't read through all 12 pages yet so this may have already been posted. With pay-per-click (non-SL) web classifieds (e.g Adsense), the amount you agree to pay is the maximum that you ever pay. However, you only actually pay the amount required to get above the person below you. Example, with bids in multiples of 10L and a minimum bid of 50L:

Business A is prepared to pay a maximum of 50L
Business B is prepared to pay a maximum of 100L
Business C is prepared to pay a maximum of 10,000L

Results:
Business A is in 3rd position and pays 50L
Business B is in 2nd position and pays 60L (10L more than A)
Business C is in top position and pays either 70L (10L more than B) or 110L (10L more than B's maximum), depending on the system.

The only time C would have to pay 10,000L is if the person below him was paying (or in some cases, prepared to pay) 9,990L.

Although it's possible with one kind of system to force a competitor to pay more than necessary by upping your maximum, with both types people are generally paying a fair price for their position and the owner of the classifieds isn't collecting large amounts for relatively poor positions.

An interesting idea, however I think that it would only work if Businesses A, B and C had identically worded listings.

If search does become more like Google, perhaps we will eventually end up with a system where the advertiser has to pay (e.g. $5L) each time someone TPs from the advert to the parcel. This, of course, would be a terrible idea....

Jiminy, I've edited my post to make it clear I was referring to pay-per-click ads rather than straight classifieds. However I'm not sure why you think it would only work with identically-worded listings?

Someone earlier in the thread posted that they were paying 16,000L for a 1st-placed ad and someone had copied theirs exactly and got the 2nd place for only 50L. With the "maximum bid" system, our poster would only be CHARGED 51L to stay in front of his/her competitor (even though their maximum bid could stay at 16,000L). If the competitor raised their bid, the 1st place bidder would be charged more automatically until the 2nd place was paying 15,999L. "Automatically" is the key point here .. this can all be done manually of course but who wants to spend their time constantly monitoring their ads?

Of course this would bring in less income initially for LL but if people are so dissatisfied with New Search that they stop advertising anyway, a "maximum bid" system might make a lot more sense (and I'm sure pay-per-TP is on its way too).

I think everyone forgets that there are some huge differences between how people search in SL as opposed to RL Google web searches.

In RL we largely buy mass produced goods. If we are shopping for a new monitor we narrow our monitor choices down to a couple of models and then price compare to find the lowest price at the best rated supplier. RL Google searches become much more challenging if you are looking for something like a couch, where you are talking about a huge selection of different styles, fabric choices, sizes, etc... Google PRODUCT seaches and IMAGE searches are what you use in that case to start narrowing down your choices. Getting to the top of a RL Google search for "couch" doesn't really help you out all that much if you aren't carrying any products that the shopper is interested in. Getting to the top of RL Google search for a customer who is comparing prices of a specific monitor: HUGE.

99% of SL products are not mass merchandized brands where customers are price comparision shopping.

Getting to the top of SL search does not necessarily translate into sales if you don't have items in the style of what the customer is looking for. So, to my line of thinking - the value is in getting onto the first or second page of the search results, not necessarily in the top spots. Just because somebody is able to game the search results get people to TP to SKINS*ANIMATIONS*SEX*CLOTHES*HAIR*SEXY*FURNITURE doesn't translate into sales if they have nothing the customer wants to buy. In fact, it usually only takes one or two of those types of teleports before a shopper learns to not bother with these types of places and heads to shops that specialize in what they are looking for.

Hi Isobel,

We were talking about a bidding system, like an eBay type thing, where you could have the system auto-bid for you, up to your chosen max, for a particular spot in the listings, which you would be then guaranteed for a month (or whatever time period.) This sounds sort of like what you're suggesting? I'm not clear.

Bingo! I wish LL would realise this!

Oryx, it's similar but not exactly the same. In Adsense for example, results are dynamic and not guaranteed for any fixed amount of time. The "bidding" is automatic in that you specify the maximum you're prepared to pay and the system will charge you only enough to stay ahead of the person with the next lowest maximum. So you couldn't have a situation where someone is paying 16,000L to be in 1st place while the 2nd place is only paying 50L. However, as soon as the 2nd place person increases (or decreases) their max. bid, the amount you're charged goes up (or down); that can happen multiple times a day which is why it really has to be managed automatically.

Isobel

Same thing, right? Which is why my classified doesn't even attempt to target "shoes" as a keyword, but a specific type of shoe.

I do agree however that search is used differently in RL and SL In RL I'm most often searching for information, not products at all. In SL I search for specific products and types of places.

Isobel

This is an interesting thought, but how does this interplay with search all? Classifieds are being yanked with the exception of the featured ads. Honestly, I have to concentrate to notice the featured ads. I don't think they are that much of an advantage to the folks showing up in them. I have to wonder about the effectiveness of the featured ads... because, clearly, we are not 'normal' people using search all.

And I think we need to take care not to superimpose shopping as the sole purpose of search all. It isn't the end-all be-all of SL. Once classifieds are out, we need to see what kind of usage we are getting from search all. If people stop using classifieds, a lot of us could be in trouble. I would have to put all my parcels in search places and then find some way to get them noticed. Ugh.

The classified ranking (to the searcher) is determined first of all by the search word used, then the amount paid for the whole adverts that include that word. Different people use different sets of search words in their adverts. For your system to work the price paid for a classified advert would have to be able to dynamically change every time a search is done and not when an advert is submitted - unless of course, the adverts are exactly the same, which I guess would be very rare ineed.

What would be the consequences of:

- removing all classifieds, or limiting the cost of a classified to a single common charge of say $L50
- removing all traffic counts from search places and removing popular places
- randomizing the order of the search results for search places and classifieds

i think this would:

- completely level the playing field
- cut out 99 per cent of gaming the system
- encourage people to explore more

Any comments?

This is exactly my point. Search is for finding cool places, cool events, cool groups, etc. My use of Search for fun stuff to do comprises 80% of my search time. Only 20% is spent shopping. (I actually was nerdy enough to record every time I used search over the period of a week wherein I was online every day, and those were the numbers I got.) Search/All MUST include places, events, and groups.

Re: Classifieds getting yanked: Is this official? Can someone point me to the Word?

Jeska said on the official blog that they are pulling all classifieds out of search all.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/12/21/new-all-search-classified-change-coming-soon/#comments

I am on the fence about this. I am okay with it so long as people go to the classifieds. If they don't, and continue to search all, it puts me in a precarious position as to listing parcels just to be found. And the system doesn't lend itself to people with small parcels.

So if they're yanking classifieds from Search/All, they're considering yanking people from Search/All, then what the heck is the POINT of Search/All? It's like they're re-inventing the current tabbed search all over again. Who is in charge up there?

The point is to find places. Or the wiki. Search all puts such a heavy emphasis on places listings... I ran a search the other night for something and places populated the first 5 pages, with the exception of one group that only had 27 members. Didn't see any classifieds, events, or people.

Honestly, all we really need is to have the ability to use operators in the tabbed searches. We wouldn't need a search of all things that is just misleading and TMI.

There is another alternative solution:

- Remove the old "search all" AND limit the new "search all" to just "search objects" as all of the other categories (classifieds, places, etc) already have their own tabs, thereby retaining most of the functionality of the new search objects google feature, which is far better than the Grid Shepherd thing that raised its head a few months back.

I think this is a terrible idea. This isn't a socialist state. People who expend the effort to get themselves seen should be rewarded appropriately. If their stuff is crap, they won't have the sales to back it up. We do not need a level playing field. The field shouldn't be level beyond what you're willing to pay. It makes crappy BIABs just as easy to find as reputable designers like Blaze, Naughty, Nicky Ree, etc. and that's wrong.

This I would agree with. Traffic as it currently stands still has too much influence on places listings and just encourages the use of alt farms.

Weighted randomization which would return results closer to the paid listing is fine for something like featured ads, but not in the body of search results. If your sales support the advertising, you should pony up. "It takes money to make money" is a truism.

But search all is not just about shopping, which is basically the point of object search.

If search all is for newbies to explore, then perhaps search all should come directly from recommended picks, and picks should be pruned to disallow changing the name of the parcel description and picture so that people cannot use picks to showcase their friends/family without regard to the parcel they are standing on.

This, of course, continues to encourage gaming of alts, but if traffic would be removed from search relevance entirely, these alts wouldn't have to be logged in.

Is James Linden still reading this thread? If so, what's your take on this so far, James?

That's not how I personally use Google: if I'm looking for a couch (to continue the example) I'd use Google to find furniture stores in my city and then go look at their online catalog to see if there's something I would want to actually go look at.

Google doesn't have to be good at finding couches, it needs to be good at returning results that are actually furniture store and not filled with useless "noise".

There's no difference in SL: if I want a couch for my house, I'll search for furniture stores and tp over to browse.